Description:

Code+ is an internship program under Duke OIT, Office of Information Technology, that sponsors a multitude of student groups working on a variety of projects. Summer 2020, I worked with a team of Duke students in the Course Permission Number Team to define system requirements with our with numerous stakeholders including the Student Information Systems and Services Office, academic departments, and OIT to simplify and streamline the course permission granting procedure. Using Ruby on Rails, we developed a web application separate from DukeHub that helps facilitates faculty and student interaction when registering for classes.

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Reflection:

Working on this Code+ project allowed me to research, create, and address real-world needs in the Duke community. I was involved in every aspect of the project from the design and development to the deployment of our completed web application. Through Code+, I collaborated with a team of students and worked with our stakeholders, Duke OIT and the SISS Office, to streamline the permission number granting process at Duke. Currently, there is no official process or platform to help students and faculty grant and receive course permission numbers, so I had the opportunity to use my technical skills to think innovatively and help create a more efficient platform to aid in this process. We created a solution that would make the process more transparent and smooth for students and also more organized and simple for faculty. Not only did I learn technical skills through workshops and training, but I also gained experience presenting and working with important stakeholders as well as learn how to be flexible and communicate with team members across different time zones.

 

None of us had any experience with Ruby on Rails coming into this internship, and we faced lots of challenges both technically and on the design level. We had to learn through trial and error and also learn to not be afraid to try different solutions. We had to continuously refine our design and logic because as we added more features we also had to think about both the student and the faculty user experiences. After creating a minimum viable product, we held user testing sessions with both faculty and students to get both perspectives and suggestions on how to make the website more user friendly and intuitive. This was an eye opening experience because we got valuable feedback and made significant changes to improve our website. Coming into this program, I had no experience with developing and implementing both the frontend and the backend of a website application. This experience has helped me grow as a developer and has also taught me how to think critically and innovatively, taking in all sides of a problem. By the end of this program, we were able to present a successful web application that could solve a problem for both faculty and students in our community.

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Artifact:

The video linked below is a demo of our web application, Mooncake. In the video, we show the main features of our web application for the faculty such as creating a multi-section cross-listed course, creating a form for the course, viewing all the requests, accepting/denying requests, emailing students, adding course managers, etc. We also show the student functions of requesting a permission number and viewing the status changes of the request.